Welcome to “Dear Daybreak”, a weekly Daybreak column. It features short vignettes about life in the Upper Valley: an encounter, some wry exchange with a stranger or acquaintance… Anything that happened in this region or relates to it and strikes a contributor as interesting or funny or poignant—or that makes us appreciate living here.

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Dear Daybreak:

If anyone ever doubted that track is a team sport, I have a tale that should dispel that illusion.

This past winter, Thetford Academy had its most successful indoor track season ever, including a D-II state championship (made all the more impressive by the fact that T.A. competes at the D-III level in every sport except indoor track). Once the regular season had concluded, we calculated that four of our male athletes—all of whom made the Vermont D-II state record board in either individual events or as part of a relay team—qualified to compete at the New Balance High School Nationals in Boston in the sprint medley relay (SMR) race. This race consists of two athletes running a 200-meter leg, one running a 400-meter leg, and the final athlete running 800 meters. It’s not contested in Vermont high school meets.

Our boys were supremely excited to have qualified to compete at an elite event that didn’t merely feature some national powerhouse high school programs but also included 2024 Olympic Gold Medalist (and high school junior) Quincy Wilson.

Then disaster struck.

Uly, who also qualified in the long jump and the 200-meter dash, was warming up for the long jump a few hours before the SMR was set to go off when he tore his Achilles tendon. Not only was he going to miss the long jump and the 200, without him we could not field a SMR team.

But wait.

We discovered that if we could find another T.A. athlete to fill in, we could still compete. But there was precious little time to find an alternate: We had to find an athlete, and he had to get to Boston pronto. A desperate phone call was made from Boston to sophomore sprinter Sebastian at about 3 pm for a race that was scheduled to start at 7 pm. He happened to be skiing at the Dartmouth Skiway at the time, but Sebastian answered the call and heroically saved the day by agreeing to drop everything and travel the two and a half hours to Boston to suit up and run the second leg with no advance notice. Incredible. He arrived with an hour to spare.

Before the race started, I was praying that the boys just wouldn’t finish last overall. I needn’t have worried: Evan, Sebastian, Luke, and Brady weren't even last in their heat, missing a third-place finish by a mere 1/10th of a second. Their final time placed them 54th among the 102 high school SMR teams that came from all over the country to compete at New Balance.

It was not merely the most exciting 3:39.33 of my life, it was a remarkable lesson on what makes a great teammate.

— Charlie Buttrey (who’s been an indoor track coach at T.A. for 14 years), Thetford

Dear Daybreak:

Playground

Consider the child who awakens happy primed and charged to seize the gift of each new day

Watch how the sun excites her and her friends like free electrons bouncing bruised and battered un-deterred by solid objects

Imagine the start of the universe in a cosmic burst of nascent energy expanding out past countless galaxies to these pink-faced laughing pig-tailed specks of scattered star dust swirling through the maple- slanted morning light

— Danny Dover, Bethel